Siggraph 2015 Rewind - Nick Campbell: 3D Lighting and Product Visualization

- Thank you guys so much for coming to the MAXON booth, first day of SIGGRAPH, I'm so excited. Thank you for coming. There's a lot of people here. There's also a ton of people online, which I want to say hi to as well whatever camera they got going there. Hundreds of people that took time out of their day to stop by and hang out with us here at the MAXON booth and learn more about CINEMA 4D and this fun stuff. If you're not familiar with Greyscalegorilla, we have been doing tutorials for the last six years for free on our site where we basically play around with CINEMA 4D, play around with all these tools. And when we come up with something that we think is beautiful or fun or unique we'll put it up on the site and show you. So that's kind of what we've been trying to do over the last six years is play with all this stuff. And also, we also try to make it look good at the end. It's something we try to focus on so there's a lot of technical stuff that we'll go through, and some buttons and some techniques. But at the end it's really about how good it looks when you show it to your client, when you show it to your friends. All the design stuff, all the lighting, all the reflection, all those things we try to concentrate on as well. So I figure what we'll do today is kind of what we do on the site. Is do a live tutorial from scratch in CINEMA 4D and it's based on something I was playing around with recently. So it's exactly the same thing. I was playing around with X-Particles on a totally different technique. I was trying to kind of cover an object with like chocolate and stuff like that. And I came up with this technique that looked like little water droplets. And I went crazy. I'm like, "I've been trying to figure this out for years." I've been trying to get, figure out the like, condensation on a bottle or on a can of beer or Coke or something forever. And I've tried cloners, I've tried the rigs that are out there and nothing looked quite the way that it looks in my head at least and not as beautiful. And somehow we've combined X-Particles and this together and I want to show you guys live how to do it very quickly. And if we have time, we've been also working on a new plugin that has to do with reflection. So if you have some time at the end of this I'd like to show you some stuff we've been working on at Greyscalegorilla as well. So let's get right into it and the first thing we need is obviously a can. So there's a lot of microbreweries popping up in Chicago. And there's a lot of cool beers and stuff. And in San Francisco so what if we take a can of beer and make it look like, as appealing as it can, right. So what I've found is the content browser's full of these 3D objects. If you have Broadcast or Studio version of CINEMA 4D you get all these 3D models like included. So a lot of times I'll just come over here, and check, and see with a search and check that out. Already from my demo, it's already there, can, right? I search can and what do I got? I have three different ones to choose from. I got the Tall Boy. We got the PBR Tall Boy. You know what I'm talking about. Then we got the regular can and we got this one too. Now I didn't mind this one. I'm just going to double click it but the bottom of it was kind of rounded off. And I'm like, "Listen, I drink enough beer I know that that's not what a can looks like." This in my head is what a can looks like. So I open this one up. I deleted the other one. There it is. Check that bottom out. That's what I'm talking about. It's all curved in. We got the top done and look the label's ready and applied for us. We just have to replace it with the label that we want. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to clear out our materials and only concentrate on these. I'm going to grab our label and we can of course import our own label, we can design a label. We can get the label from the brewery and put it in here. But I ended up finding one of my favorite beers from a brewery in San Francisco and I wanted to load it up because, oh well, you'll see. You'll see. I think it'll be apparent once it's in. So let's pull this in. This is the 21st Amendment Down to Earth Session IPA. Now Session IPA is code for, "I'm going to drink all day." And I don't want a very alcoholic beer, you know. I'm from Michigan so it's kind of the two bin, you know, campfire beer. You know what I'm saying. So we have our label here. Now this is actually getting multiplied so let's open up this texture, and turn off the multiplication and just say normal. That way it'll just show. And instantly it's all, you know, mapped properly and we have our cool little monkey here in a hammock. Who doesn't a love monkey in a hammock. We got our logos here. Well let's just kind of position it the way we think it will be set up in the world here. And "Boom" we have our can. So what do we do now? Well we have some basic lighting setup. In CINEMA 4D they give you a default light that's attached to the camera. But that's not very realistic. We don't have an environment for this to reflect. And as you've heard and as you'll hear a lot, I love reflections. I love making it all shiny so we need something for this object to reflect. And what I've been using recently is HDRIs. Now HDRIs if you're familiar you know that it captures light data and puts it into a file format that allows you to then kind of regurgitate that light data back onto your object in 3D. And we built a tool called HDRI Studio that allows you to add quickly HDRIs to your scene. So let's add that really quickly here. There's a lot of plug-ins in here. So we got HDRI Studio. We have a floor. We have Reflections and we're all set to go. So now, our can has reflections around it. We have our floor down here. We have a long way to go but that set up a really basic part of it. While we're at it, let's grab a camera. Never use the default camera in CINEMA. You always want to act like a photographer and pick the lens and pick the camera that you want to use instead of letting somebody else decide for you. I'm going to pick a 60-millimeter lens because I kind of want a more studio zoomed in effect on this can. And we're just going to kind of place things around. And I want to do one last thing which is I don't want this infinite floor. This look is good sometimes but sometimes I want more of a studio look with a more proper like cyc on it. So for that I'm going to go to our presets and we're not going to use [inaudible] Pro in this tutorial other than to just pull one of these cycs out. I like Studio S. If we zoom out you, can see we have kind of this big studio here. And that reminds me our can is pretty tiny as well. So let's scale this up. Just kind of, fit a regular scene. What I tend to like is to kind of look at a primitive object and say, "i roughly want my object that size, " especially if you're looking at one object. If you have scales of objects, it's fine. Get them bigger and smaller but if you're using one object scale it up. Get some more room in your scene. So there you go. So we have our can, we have our cyc. Let's go to HDRI Studio and just turn off the floor very quickly. And again hit render. We have reflections. We have our floor. We have no shadows. We have nothing so where do we go from here. You know what let's add our render settings first and then we'll go into X-Particles and we'll add all those droplets and make sure that we're looking good at just the can. Because if we can make the can look good on its own those water droplets are just going to be that extra [inaudible] through it. So in HR Studio Rig we also included instant render settings, which are just a series of render settings that we use all the time at Greyscalegorilla for our projects. We decided that this should be that easy to set up. Instead of setting up your physical render settings, and your GI, and your ambient inclusion and tweaking all that stuff. We have these series of presets. So I'm just going to go to GI low, which is a global illumination preset that's a little bit low quality but allows us to see it very quickly so that we can reiterate and go through things. So I'm going to use the interactive render region. And that allows us to see the render kind of, as we make changes. So it's kind of a low-res version of it and you can see as I tweak stuff we're going to see different things come in. So what I really want to do is use a different HDR for this scene. This is more of a studio look. And we can use this studio. In fact, we can go to our studios, and pick something like ColorBox Studio and see what that looks like. We have so really narrow reflections. You can see it's that one right there. We have this bevel reflection, which is large, soft boxes really bright, really nice render. But I've been using these more and more. These are shot super high-res. HDRs of real scenes that give you more realistic reflections. So this one right here's called church entrance. And we get some really nice highlights. Check out some of those reflections we get on the right. We also get this nice day glow. Let's check out a couple more. This one's fun. This is a dam road. So let's see what that looks like and it looks like it's fine except it's reversed. So the bright part is kind of behind us. So what we have is a preview. The preview allows us to see where the bright part is and to kind of move it around until it's where we want it. So let's put the part in the front. Oop, a little too far in the front let's move it off to the side. And that's more like it. It's kind of coming in from the side there. We have some nice reflections going on. And again, we can always tweak this stuff later. But I think that's looking pretty good, good reflections, good floor and so let's add those droplets. We're going to use X-Particles. And you're going to load up an XP system. Now X-Particles if you're not familiar allows you to put millions of particles in your scene. It's usually for like all these crazy particle effects, and explosions and SYFY stuff and all the great things that it does. I didn't ever think to use it as a droplet maker. But when I started working that way and the skinner worked the way it did, I'm like, "All right, this is great." So let's see how we set this up. I'm going to turn off our interactive render region for now. I'm going to turn off our preview for HDR and just kind of concentrate on the can. In your XP system, you're going to want to make an emitter. So let's make an emitter. Hit "Play" and you're going to see this emitter as just emitting particles kind of like backwards, right. Well we don't want it to emit particles from this little rectangle. We want it to emit from the can. So we can come into our emitter, go to objects and where it says rectangle we have objects. So let's go ahead, and grab that and drag our soda can into it. Let me just turn off this cyc just for now. So we can just really concentrate on just the can. So now, we have particles coming out of the can, "Boom." This is cool on its own if you ever need X-Particles for other stuff where you want things to come off of particles and like a car driving by and you have all that. It works beautifully, but in this case, we don't want it to explode. We want the particles to kind of be born on the can and stay there. And there's another thing that's happening, which is it's a little too uniform. You're seeing that the particles are coming out kind of on the axes or on the points where the geometry is. So for example if we go into right here where we just dropped our object. We have soda can and then below it says, "Polygon center." We don't want polygon center we want polygon area. This is going to be much more uniform. You can see it's a lot more uniform. It's coming out in all places not just on the intersections. The other thing we want to do is go to emission and turn down the speed. So now, when these particles are being born they're being born on the can. And I'm going to scale these up a little bit, so you could see them. Just so, in the audience these little green dots are showing up on the can. But I'm going to try to make them not dots. Let's go with ticks and see if that's bigger. There you go. So now, hopefully you can see that. Okay. Now these ticks are showing up on the can a few every frame. But we don't want that either. We want them all to just be there on frame zero or on frame one. How do we do that? We go to our emitter, we go to emission and instead of rate, we go to shot. What shot does is it emits all the particles that you tell it to emit in one shot. It's kind of like a shotgun "Boom" and it's just on there. So how do we set this up? We say shot, shot count 1,000. And we should have all of our particles right there. Now I said rate. There they are. Let's go to pulse. Pulse does it per piece here. Shot should do it on frame one and then be done. Why doesn't that...trigger's not right. Shot, shot time one, shot time boom. Whoa, that's never happened to me. I'm sure there's like one switch somewhere I'm missing if anybody can see that so rate...all right we'll just cheat and use rate. A middle frames off. We're just going to make sure we get a few particles and there we go. This is a little bit like we have it. So we have our emitter going for two frames now. We emit all these particles and what do we do now? Well we need a skinner. We need to take these particles and tell them to...try to recreate like a liquid. And X-Particles has that built in. We can go up here, we can go to, it's skinner right here, turn it on and instantly you're going to see this blobby kind of mess all over our can. This is when I looked at what I was trying to build and I said, "Whoa, that kind of looks like water droplets. The scale's off. It's like this gray color but this might actually work." Let's see if we can do it. And this is how I got to where we ended up. So first thing you want to do on your skinner is come in, pick your...let's just keep it right here at heart. There's a ton of different systems for blobs but I first of all want to reduce our polygon size. I'm going to do something more like two centimeters. And now already in the view port you can see that's it's a lot more at scale for droplets. Now there's not enough of them but they're there and this is where I started to go, "Okay, this is showing promise." So then, what could do is just start to kind of add more and more particles so I'm just going to add a zero. I'm going to do 10 times more particles. I'm going to move forward in time and hopefully when all these particles are born it takes a few seconds for it to calculate and then we get some particles. So let's make sure our scale is proper before we move on. I'm going to hit render. And that's going to start to render this. That's looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and make it transparent so we don't have like a goo all over our beer. That's not appetizing. We're going to make a new material and add it to our skinner and then we're going to open up that material and make it transparent. So we do that by opening it up, turning off our color channel altogether making it transparent and making it refractive. So that what's behind it is a little bit warped. We also want to add some reflectance directly to this. So what we're going to do is add some, let's go ahead and just add a full Beckman no Fresnel nothing, just get a lot of reflection. So let's hit render. Let's see where we are. Now we're getting somewhere. This is where I got real excited. I think I got out of my seat, did a little dance, I was like, "All right, we got some good looking water. What do we do now?" Okay so from here I was like, "All right, let's set up this render let's go ahead and turn our cyc back on. Let's go ahead and like make a color for the back of our cyc so instead of this white backdrop let's pick a color from the logo, let's pick a color from the branding. And we can open this up and just go ahead and just color pick right there on the screen into the can. Now we have this nice background that blends in with the scene. We have our global illumination render settings all on preset and we're going to render tons of particles with all the GI with all the reflection going on. And it's probably here where I said, "That can looks pretty good but it's not reflective enough. It's not reflecting its environment enough. Let's go ahead and see what its reflection settings are." And right now, we have some decent ones. It's a little bit blurry reflection not a lot of it but a little bit of blurry reflection. Let's go ahead and turn that up. And then using reflectance let's add a new layer. Let's add a Beckman layer, which is going to add more reflection. Let's go down, and turn on some Fresnel and let's see what that gets us. What that should do is add a lot more of the environment into our render, into our can that is. So hopefully we're going to see a lot more reflection. It's going to get a lot more light data for our water droplets to play with. And it's really going to make it look a lot more realistic. So let's check this render as it goes. It's looking pretty good. Yep. See that reflection up at the top there, that Down to Earth part right up in the top corner. That's what I'm going for. I want that realistic kind of sun to show. In fact, I'm going to cheat a little bit and kind of tilt up and make that reflection really cascade across. So let's just turn off the skinner really quickly just to make sure that our reflections are how we want on the can. Perfect. That's what I'm talking about. Let's turn our skinner back on and talk about our final render. So if this is a still render, if you want to show this to your client you say, "Here's your can. Here's what it looks like with all the water droplets on it." You'd start to turn up your global illumination settings, and you can just come into your settings here and you can pick, you know, medium instead of low and start to see what that looks like. We'll leave it at low just for now for a demo to show you. Basically, as you go up the chain with our render settings you're going to have less grain and more sharp reflections. And so this will give you a pretty good estimate of what the final will look like. You get to send this to your client. And maybe the answer for them is like, "Holy crap that looks amazing. But can we have it animated?" And you go, "Didn't think about that. How can we do that?" Well let's turn off our skinner really quickly and let me show you a technique using X-Particles to add actual water droplets coming down the can because that's really the refreshing part, right. Somebody slams their can of Coke or beer down or whatever and all the droplets are moving around. How do we set that up? Well that's where we can use X-Particles and groups to effect different particles separately. So in our system we can basically just duplicate this emitter. This emitter is already doing a lot right. It's emitting on the can. And it already has the can installed. It already has all this stuff. So we can just copy and paste it. I'm going to pull it into our emitters to keep it a little bit organized and I'm going to say this one's the falling drops. Okay I'm going to turn off our other system and concentrate just on the drops. The other thing I'm going to do is in our display I'm going to pick a different color. These are going to be white and they're not going to be ticks these are going to be boxes. So let's go back to frame one and you guys can see that there. Now the white droplets are going to be white boxes. Those are the ones that are going to fall. And then the green ones will be the static ones that they'll...and they'll combine to make this liquid effect. So let's set this up. Obviously, we don't want that many drops. We can go back into our number here and really kind of delete some zeros. Let's start over. And that's not enough maybe 10 times more of that. Okay. Then you got me. Let's go half. That's looking about right. About that many drops, those will be the ones moving down. And what do we do to make them move? Well let's go back to our system and start to use modifiers. Modifiers in X-Particles are kind of like effectors in MoGraph if you've used those. These allow us to control all these clones in different ways. I could come in here and say first of all, "I want you to follow the surface because when I want, when you're moving down I want you to stick to the can as you move. I don't want you to be free in the world." So follow surface. What do you want to follow? You drop this in your objects and now no matter what these will always stick to the surface. The other thing I want to do is on the emitter itself to, when they emit I want them to aim downwards. So we can go back to our object and we can say not the phong normal we want you to go negative Y. When you are born, we want you with initial velocity going down. We're kind of faking gravity a little bit. And so we say that but of course we have no speed, which means they're not moving. So we have to go to our emission and give them a little bit of speed. Let's just try five centimeters rebirth them, eh, not enough, right? Ten, let's go click on this 10 back. There we go. Now we got some sweat moving down. Okay. I'm going to speed this up just for the visual so we can see what's going on. Now we have our particles that are moving down. The problem is as soon as I turn on this other emitter which let's go ahead and do that. What's going to happen is these modifiers are going to affect everything. And in fact, I want to add one more modifier just to show the point. I want to add a modifier that is gravity. So let's go ahead and go to gravity. Let's turn off our still dots here. Turn on gravity and you're going to see that's going way to fast. That's not, you know, I want a little bit of friction on the bottle or on the can. I don't want them to just like fall freely. I want them to just kind of stick to the can and move down. So I can take our gravity and just reduce it like a lot. Let's go to 50 instead of 100s, right? So now, when they're born they're just going to kind of slide down. Even that might be a little bit fast. Let's go to 30. Okay so now what happens is if we turn on our other particles these are also going to be affected by our gravity. So if you look they're all falling. And that's not what we want. We want only the white ones to fall and not the green ones. So how do we set that up? Well we can go to our actual modifiers and in the modifiers, you're going to see this groups affected and that basically allows us to put particles into different groups and say, "This group, you do these things and this group, you do these things." So let's go ahead and set up a group for the falling drops. Let's go to groups and say create in that group. What's really cool is it adds this icon that is the color of the particles so we know what we're working with here. And now we can go to our gravity and say, "Listen gravity, gravity you. You only affect the falling drops and not the other one same with our follow surface." Now I'm not sure how much of a difference it's going to make on follow surface but let's just be sure. And so now when we emit our particles you're going to see that the green ones stay still and the white ones are the ones that are falling down. That's what we want. So the last bit of this is to turn on our skinner. And when we do, it's going to combine both particles. Well I should say that it should combine both particles but we do have to tell it. So it says right here sources, objects, XP emitter that's our original one. If we want to add the new emitter, we just drag it in here. Falling drops and XP emitter are going to be calculated together. And what this means is as the liquid flows through they're going to combine and separate like liquid does. They're going to combine and get bigger, and then fall and get smaller. So we would from here set this up as a final animation. We crank up our settings a little bit. Make sure all of our grain is nice and clean for our GI. But let's get an idea what this looks like, as a still and then I'll open up a final movie that we rendered with these techniques to show you the kind of final look. It's got some really nice drops here. We got some really nice reflections and I think that looks pretty appetizing. I'm going to go look for one later today. But let's check out the final render here and show you the animation when it's all set, ready to go. So this is the next render setting up. This is our high render or the medium render settings with all the transparency and if you look closely, you're going to see those droplets not just fall down separately but really combine when they touch. It's a subtle effect. But I think that that's, those are the kind of things in animation that you're clients are going to say like, "Aw, you went the extra mile. I like that. It's moving." We also added a little camera zoom using Signal really simple stuff but in less than 30 minutes, we have this really nice product shot set up. Of course, we can move around and get it from any angle. Let me show you one more cool thing. Let's also mess with some of the reflectance in here. We want to open up this can and realize that the...let's just go ahead and effect only this texture. So let's move it up. And in this case, I'm just going to turn off our backdrop and now I only want to kind of mess with the can up here. Now there's a ton of particles on this that we could fix but really what I'm interested in is making sure that this reflection looks really good. So what we could do is we have some basic specular and basic reflection. And again, I'm just going to turn off specular. We'll leave luminance on and I'm going to add an extra shiny kind of chrome to the top here. The last thing I think I need to do is with our particles I need to turn on transparency. That's actually not looking so bad. Some of these ones on the edge are not picking up the transparency very well. But that's okay. Let's go ahead and move our camera around, make sure we have a nice looking scene here. That's kind of the look we're going for. So what if you want to do the close up, right? Let's go ahead and we have our chrome all set up. We have our can set up and the last thing we need to do is tell our HDR to be visible in transparency. This is a new thing we have in HDR Studio rig. You can say scene by transparency that's a go. And now when we render you're going to see not just the particles but it's also going to refract to the background. So it looks like we have to add a little bit more geometry to this if we zoom in this close. But you can see it's pretty scalable. What I might do on this shot is scale things down a little bit. Add a little bit more geometry to our liquid. But it's really, really flexible and you can see it moves very quickly and it renders really, really nice. So that is where we ended up. Let me show the final one, one more time here, open recent. There you go. So we had a lot of fun playing with this getting X-Particles combined with CINEMA 4D and some lighting to really get some product shots. Been doing more and more product stuff lately just because I like the simplicity of it, just put the object in the center, make it look as good as we can. So with that we have a bit of time left. I wanted to show you, let me open a new scene file here. I wanted to talk about a tool we've been working on specifically that is all about reflection. If you were here last year at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, R16 came out and CINEMA 4D introduced Reflectance. Has anybody used Reflectance? Yeah? So Reflectance is absolutely gorgeous. It emulates reflections more realistically. It allows you to stack reflections just like you would in real life. And reflections are really, what the world is made out of. Everything that you see around you is reflected light. That's how our eyes see the world. So reflection in 3D is a really important part of it. Reflectance goes a long way to making things more realistic using the standard and physical render tools inside of CINEMA 4D. However if you've opened Reflectance you may notice that it's laid out completely differently than old Reflection tools. The standard kind of Reflection tools before R16 allowed you to add reflection, more reflection, less reflection, add Fresnel to it and that was about it. And this one's a lot more powerful but it is a little bit more intimidating to new users even to people that have been using CINEMA 4D for a long time opened this menu up and went, "This is a little bit more complicated than I'm used to." And honestly it kind of pushed people away from Reflectance. So we don't want that to happen. I don't want that to happen. I think Reflectance is gorgeous. I want more people to use Reflectance so we thought whenever we see a problem or we see a design thing in CINEMA 4D that we're like, "I wish it was a little bit easier." My brain starts thinking software. You saw HDRI Studio for that reason. We wanted a one-button solution to add reflections to our scene. If you use light kit, that was built on the same idea. TopCoat, which is our new plugin, is the same thing. So we really sat down and thought about how Reflectance is being used by everybody. And we wanted to make it even easier to not only add reflectance to your scene but also do things like copy and paste materials from one to another or even select more than one object and apply reflectance to more than one object. So I wanted to give you a really, really basic demo, quick demo. This is not even a beta version. This is kind of a pretty early version of TopCoat but I wanted to show you how powerful it is. So let's set up a scene just so we can get the idea set up. So I'm going to use an object let's, you know, whenever I'm doing lighting or texturing well, you know, there's nothing like a bunch of shiny spheres here to get me excited. Let's set up our HDR as well so of course when there's reflection you need something to reflect. So let's go ahead and add HDR Studio. Let's turn off the floor and let's just keep it there for now. Okay. The last thing I'll do is just add some render settings so we have some basic rendering that we can see. Okay. So let's go ahead and render that. This is kind of the standard Reflection. All this stuff is from the old school Reflection and a lot of times when you're using Reflectance, you kind of want to kill the old Reflection. The old Reflection model is not as realistic. It's not as good looking and for you to come in and like change it on multiple materials, keep in mind that this also works on multiple materials, was a little bit tedious. You had to open up one and delete it and open up the other one and delete it. Now with TopCoat the first thing I'll show you is the ability to kind of delete and kill Reflectance so you can start from a scratch place which I do all the time with old models, with old things. So now, when we hit render it's just going to be our base layer no reflection, nothing here, just to start from scratch. So when we thought about TopCoat and what it does we really thought about Reflectance in the way that the real world uses Reflection. If you finish a car, if you finish a guitar, if you finish a wall, or a paint, or all these things all these materials lay on top of other materials to make them kind of shinier or more, or scratched or lacquer. All these models are already around us. So how do we use Reflectance to kind of model that? So we built this TopCoat menu to emulate some of our most used parts of Reflectance. So you can see down here we have a dull, shiny reflection. Let's go ahead and turn on our interactive render region just so we can see all of these in use. So here is our basic reflection really small amount of reflection but again everything has reflection. I use this on things that you think have no reflection like a piece of drywall. This is perfect for that because drywall does have reflection it's just not shiny, right. It's not what you think of as shiny reflection. So this is more of a dull look. We also have a worn look, which allows us a little bit sharper reflection but let me make sure I don't think it triggered the render. So it's a little bit sharper reflection but not quite in your face as much. Let's go jump to something more like gloss. Gloss is a lot more shiny, right. So let's go ahead and turn this texture to black just so you can see the real differences here. So again, dull, much more matte, much more shiny let's deselect that so you can see it. We have worn. And these are all great, right. We could just click these to make them. We have our kind of chrome and the real key though is when you combine these on top of each other. So for example if we have a matte layer then we add a flakes layer which is kind of a metal, flake car paint layer. You'll start to see that show up. And then you click gloss and the important thing is that I'm holding down the shift key every time I do that. As you add more layers to your reflectance if you hold down shift, they're going to add on top of each other. So you're going to see what we built with only three clicks is a matte layer at the bottom, a flakes layer above that and a gloss layer above that. So this allows us to really quickly layer reflectance and be able to adjust it. So what if we get to the end here we say, "This looks good." But we want it overall less reflective. Well this is where the modifiers come in. We can come over here, and say reflection amount and turn it down. This is going to turn down the overall reflection amount of all the layers. If you only want to affect the last layer that you added, you can hold down shift, turn down the reflection amount. And now only that top most layer will change. We can also add blurriness to all of these layers so they're not so clean. We can decrease and add Fresnel. And in this case, we want to turn up the scale of our sparkles. They weren't quite showing up in that render. So now, we have the car paint maybe that's a little much. I could tone it back down a little bit. But now if I do a higher-res render here you're going to see we have our car paint sparkles with gloss on top of it with a base coat. And this with the current Reflectance system would have been a lot of, you know, tweaking and up and down tweaking all this stuff and now we have this car paint ready to go. What's nice about TopCoat is if it's not looking the way you want you can just start over by clicking one of these materials and it'll override it and start from scratch. So this is great in the current settings, but what happens when you have multiple materials and you really want to dial in all that stuff. So let's do a more realistic scene here. I'm going to open up a 3DS model, which I get all the time. It seems every time I get a model from TurboSquid or something like that that's always in this 3DS format, which is nice because all the textures are, tend to be ready to go. They're like mapped properly but of course, all the textures come in. They're translated from 3D Max and they're not really made for CINEMA 4D. So how do we take this kind of untextured gray bike here and really make it look nice and shiny in the chrome and black metal and all this leather and rubber and stuff. How do we get all this stuff set up? Well the first thing we need to do is set up our scene so obviously we have nothing to reflect. Let's quickly add our HDR Studio. Let's keep the floor in this time. Let's move it down, going to kind of center it a little bit. And also I want the backdrop not to be white I want it to be more of, come on, you know, it's a Harley, we want it to be a little bit more dramatic here. So we have our scene and I'm also going to add our render settings as well I use these constantly now instead of tweaking all that stuff all the time. If you want to learn what those render settings are we have a tutorial you can watch it to see how we set these up. But you can see now what we have is this bike, that's great model, but the textures are just not there, right. It's all these gray textures, black textures. How do we start to effect this? Well it used to be you had to select one start layering these things up until it looks right and then move on to the next one. You also didn't have the ability for example if I want to remove all these specular objects I can't really select them all because as soon as I reflect them all Reflectance kind of goes gray. And this is the thing that's a little confusing to a lot of new Reflectance users you just really can't effect multiple Reflectance channels at once. We built some tools into TopCoat to allow us to do this. We can go to plugins open it up and in this case, we're going to kill all the reflectance. And again we're going to start from scratch and that's going to redo all of our materials. And now that we've done that, we can start layer by layer to build this bike. So again interactive render regions we can see our results very quickly. Let's start with this silver layer. So the silver layer, let's go with chrome. So instantly, it's going to add our chrome to it and then we can also go to metals and you can see we have all the metals that are included in Reflectance right here to click on. You don't have to twirl anything open. And we can literally go to silver here. It's already labeled and click it. So silver you see it's going to give us a little bit different in our reflection Fresnel. But we also want to blur it just a little bit so it's not this perfect thing. It's a little bit blurry and we have these modifiers to allow you to turn up the blurriness. So that looks a little bit better. Let's move on to chrome. Chrome's a no brainer we hit the chrome button watch this thing come to life. Bing. We have our gum layer. Now gum is going to be the tires and the seat together, right. So we can actually pick our dull layer and see what that looks like now again the dull that looks pretty good. That's a little too reflective, right. That sea is a little too shiny, right, too much Armor All on that one. So we can go to our modifiers, tone down our reflection amounts and you can see it'll instantly tweak just that one texture so a little bit less. I just want a little bit of reflection on that one. And the other one that is really going to be important is this black metal texture and that's all that stuff inside here that's not being reflected. Let's go to TopCoat and in this case, let's experiment with a few of them. We could make it chrome but I think the whole bike will be too blinged out, right? We could make it wet. I think gloss might be a good one, but here is where we could start to layer things up a little bit. So let's try lacquer and I'm going to hold shift and add gloss on top of it. That's going to give it a little bit more detail. That's going to have a blurry layer with a shiny layer on top of it. And that's really what we're trying to do is allow you that quickly to make a bike. So this is okay. I'm not a fan of this studio setting right now so again let's pick one of our outdoor scenes, you know, this bikes going to be on the road. So let's see what it looks like in this environment. That looks pretty cool. We got some nice colors there. Let's try this one. This one's kind of an indoor, more of like a garage setting, with some weird brightness going on that's not my favorite one for this look. Let's try church outdoor. That's got some really nice reflection going on. So now, what if we want...our clients asking us, you know, "What if we want some different types of materials? Let's say this gas tank is like, okay well a gas tanks great but it's all blurry and there's no shininess to it so can you tone down that blurriness and then add more of a shiny coat on top of it?" Well at any moment you could grab that texture so in this case it's the silver texture and again we can open up TopCoat and if we want to add layers on top of it we can just go ahead and hold down shift while we add our new layer. And then we get it right away. So let's go ahead and add a wet layer. I'm going to shift click and now instantly you're going to see all that clean coat on top of it. So if all of these coats are going to kind of blend together and again if we want to start over and the client's like, "No, we want to see some color, right. We don't want this whole thing to just be black and chrome or whatever. We want to introduce a little like fun into it so what do we do?" And we go, "All right, kill Reflectance. Let's start over here." We're going to go back to gray and they go, "What if it was like a bright, you know, orange car paint or whatever?" We can open this layer up, go to our color and then just make our colors here. TopCoat again is only about the reflection. It's not about everything below it. Anything you want below it you just kind of add just like you would normally. And then they go, "Okay that's a good orange." Let's start to build up that car paint. So we can add our flakes to it. Let's make sure our scale is good on our flakes. That looks nice. We got our...that's a little heavy on the flakes. I feel like I'm at Cedar Point a little mid west shout out for you. But we got some car, some flakes going on but flakes on their own just look like you threw metal all over it. It looks like it got caught at like a birthday party. When you buff it, when you put another gloss coat on top of it that's when this metal flake turns into like, oh, it gets horror kind of look or a car kind of look. So let's add the gloss coat. I'm going to hold shift, click gloss and that's going to add that gloss coat on top, which now we get all these nice reflections and everything on top of it. Let's look at our scale now on our modifiers. We can scale up our metal flakes to see like bigger chunks. And I think from afar that's going to be a better look for this bike. So the actual orange isn't my favorite look. Good news we can come in here and just, you know, pick something a little bit more appropriate. That's a little fun. Now our flakes seem a little bit large. Let's go ahead and scale our textures down a little bit. And that's looking pretty good. So again, from here we can tweak our lighting. We can make sure that it's looking good in different environments but there you go. So other parts of TopCoat, I just want to show you before we go and by the way, like I said this is a very early version of TopCoat. We just started playing with it. We wanted to show you guys here at SIGGRAPH because we like your feedback. Showing this to the general, general public, we want it to be a little bit more tied down than what it is but you know, SIGGRAPH customers and people out there watching this stuff you guys actually use CINEMA all day. Hopefully you've tried Reflectance so we kind of want your feedback as well on parts of Reflectance that are a little bit more complicated for you guys that we could add in here. So you can see as we go down it's not just the basic TopCoats. Let's go ahead and pick chrome just to kind of start from scratch but if we go to our bumps layer you're going to see there's a ton of procedural bumps that are also included. And this is where Reflectance gets powerful too. You can layer your, put layers in Reflectance and say this one's a little bumpy. Then you put a clear coat on it and you get those differences. So let's go ahead and build that. In this case, I'm going to say what this imperfections one or let's try fibers. So fibers I'm going to zoom in you're going to see it's all procedural. It's going to give us this nice texture. Let's go ahead and render that because you can see right away, check out all this procedural bump that we get for free. Really, really nice. It scales up and down it doesn't tile. It doesn't do any of that stuff. And it automatically gives us a lot of detail in that environment. However just like we did before, if we want to add that gloss coat on top we could go shift gloss now we get the clear coat with the bumps under it. And again, this is where Reflectance really starts to look really nice. So we can zoom up, got all the bumps, let's zoom out look at our final. Let's see what we got. Very cool. Overall, I'm like, "All right, let's scale up the textures get those bumps a little bit bigger." It's overall a little bit too reflective so let's tone that down. And of course, we can go ahead and add layers and layers on top of that. So of course, you can go crazy I think you...up to 20 layers in Reflectance and you can shift click your way through this. We won't have a ton of time to look at presets but we're also looking at other ways to include more than just basecoats so we have these presets nail polish, oil slick, those rainbows that you get over certain things. In fact, pearl rainbow maybe I will show only because I love this look so much. It's a really glossy colored kind of reflection and I just want to make sure that the reflections look nice. I'm going to check one more out. Let's go to car interior. This is a weird HDR but it has some really nice reflection to it. Especially as we rotate it around. So there we go. So very, very rendered now let me make sure we do a high-res version before we go so it's rendering in the background so you guys can see what the final kind of look can be. I'm going to rotate this back around here. Yeah, that's looking pretty good. Okay so let's go to our render settings. Let's turn this back up to let's go with medium. And let's do a final render in our picture viewer. And that's it. That's it for me today. But we really wanted to make that tool because we see a lot of potential in Reflectance and not a lot of people that are jumping ahead first into it and really diving in. We hope that a friendlier interface will help that. So any ways that you guys use Reflectance let us know. We want to make sure it works for you. You'll see Reflectance and TopCoat in Texture Kit Pro in the next six months I hope. And that'll be free to our current Texture Kit Pro users. If you already own Texture Kit Pro you'll be seeing that in your inbox pretty soon. As soon as we get it working a little bit tighter. So thanks again for MAXON for having me and thank you guys and the internet for coming by today and checking out what I've been playing with.